Intel's Clear Linux Still Outperforming Other Distributions For Mid-2020

The benchmark with the most significant difference from late 2019 to now was the systemd boot time. At the end of 2019 it took 2.58 seconds for the system to boot, which is good enough for most users already, but now that same system with the newest Clear Linux packages is booting in just 1.06 seconds! Boot times have been important for Clear Linux due to wanting to spin up VMs in the cloud as possible to respond to changing server demand, quickly booting the platform for use within automobiles, and other similar use-cases.

Some workloads like GraphicsMagick were as much as 13% faster on the latest Clear Linux thanks to the toolchain updates this year.

ASKAP saw a 10% improvement with the newer state of Clear Linux.

The NGINX web server was running 7% faster with the software improvements made this year.

SQLite also was running faster, potentially due to the I/O scheduler change, upgraded kernel, and/or compiler improvements.